'You look at the Guide: there's nothing that indicates where's a good place to eat. That's where their system fails. It's a dated format.

'People want to know more. Michelin needs to create new categories and add a little bit of prose that says something about the restaurant.'

Some say that Michelin's insistence on perfection - elaborate decoration, perfect service - is responsible for the stratospheric prices at three-star restaurants, which can start from £100 per person.

The costs have to be passed on to someone - inevitably the customer. That may be why last year a French onestar restaurant asked to be dropped from the star bracket so it could offer its patrons almost the same menu at about half the price.

But when Michelin removed one of the two stars from chef Alain Zick's Paris restaurant, Zick killed himself.

Raymond Blanc, who owns Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons near Oxford, has spent more than £5 million on renovations in an attempt to raise his rating from two to three stars.

Last year, Marco Pierre White, one of Britain's most celebrated chefs, and Nico Ladenis, who created Chez Nico at 90 Park Lane, each requested that Michelin remove their three-star ratings. Marco Pierre White said that gastronomy was dying, and that people no longer wanted both the formality and elaborate meals of great restaurants.

Michelin denies that the Guide has made international haute cuisine into a cul-de-sac of ostentation and fussiness.

Paul Cordle, a spokesman for the Michelin Guide in Britain, says: 'We would argue that the market for two and three-star restaurants exists. What we do is identify when a restaurant has achieved those standards.'

Cordle admits that the starred restaurants in the Guide tend to be French: 'Why, I don't honestly know.

'Perhaps the people cooking at that level in the French tradition have the money to invest to achieve those ratings.

'One thing we never say is that the Guide, with ten inspectors, covers every restaurant in the UK. We may not have found that particular Indian or Chinese restaurant that deserves recognition.' And Michelin wants its readers to write in highlighting those restaurants, he said. In the meantime, don't rely on the Michelin Guide to lead you to the cutting edge of the British culinary scene, if that's what you want.

It is frankly useless in identifying the new and exciting little restaurants that can take British cooking to a new level - in other words, the sort of places that we all want to know about.

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